Rebecca Newberger-Goldstein

Miller Scholar

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein grew up in White Plains, New York, and
graduated summa cum laude from Barnard College, receiving the Montague
Prize for Excellence in Philosophy, and immediately went on to graduate
work at Princeton University, receiving her Ph.D. in philosophy. While
in graduate school she was awarded a National Science Foundation
Fellowship and a Whiting Foundation Fellowship.

After earning her Ph.D. she returned to her alma mater, where she
taught courses in philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, philosophy
of psychology, the rationalists, the empiricists, and the ancient
Greeks. It was some time during her tenure at Barnard that, quite to
her own surprise, she used a summer vacation to write her first novel, The Mind-Body Problem. As she described it,

To me the process is still mysterious. I had just come through a
very emotional time, having not only become a mother but having also
lost my father, whom I adored. In the course of grieving for my father
and glorying in my daughter, I found that the very formal, very precise
questions I had been trained to analyze weren’t gripping me the way they
once had. Suddenly, I was asking the most `unprofessional’ sorts of
questions (I would have snickered at them as a graduate student), such
as how does all this philosophy I’ve studied help me to deal with the
brute contingencies of life? How does it relate to life as it’s really
lived? I wanted to confront such questions in my writing, and I wanted
to confront them in a way that would insert `real life’ intimately into
the intellectual struggle. In short I wanted to write a philosophically
motivated novel.

The Mind-Body Problem was published by Random House and went on to become a critical and popular success.

More novels followed: The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind; The Dark Sister, which received the Whiting Writer’s Award, Mazel, which received the 1995 National Jewish Book Award and the 1995 Edward Lewis Wallant Award; and Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics. Her book of short stories, Strange Attractors, received a National Jewish Book Honor Award. Her 2005 book Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, was featured in articles in The New Yorker and The New York Times, received numerous favorable reviews, and was named one of the best books of the year by Discover magazine, the Chicago Tribune, and the New York Sun. Goldstein’s most recent published book is, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew who Gave Us Modernity, published in May 2006, and winner of the 2006 Koret International Jewish Book Award in Jewish Thought. Her latest novel, Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, was published by Pantheon Books in 2010. .

In 1996 Goldstein became a MacArthur Fellow, receiving the prize
which is popularly known as the “Genius Award.” In awarding her the
prize, the MacArthur Foundation described her work in the following
words:

Rebecca Goldstein is a writer whose novels and short stories
dramatize the concerns of philosophy without sacrificing the demands of
imaginative storytelling. Her books tell a compelling story as they
describe with wit, compassion and originality the interaction of mind
and heart. In her fiction her characters confront problems of faith:
religious faith and faith in an ability to comprehend the mysteries of
the physical world as complementary to moral and emotional states of
being. Goldstein’s writings emerge as brilliant arguments for the
belief that fiction in our time may be the best vehicle for involving
readers in questions of morality and existence.

In 2005 she was elected to The American Academy of Arts and
Sciences. In 2006 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Radcliffe
Fellowship. In 2008, she was designated a Humanist Laureate by the
International Academy of Humanism, and was awarded an Honorary
Doctorate by Emerson College, where she gave the commencement address.
Goldstein has been designated Humanist of the Year 2011 by the American
Humanist Association.

Aside from Barnard, Goldstein has taught in the Columbia MFA
writing program and in the department of philosophy at Rutgers, has been
a visiting scholar at Brandeis University, and taught for five years as
a Visiting Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Trinity College
in Hartford, Connecticut. In 2006-2007 she was a Fellow at the
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a
Guggenheim Fellow. Currently she is a Research Associate in the
Department of Psychology, Harvard University.

Goldstein has served as a judge for many book prizes, including the
Koret International Jewish Book Award, the Sammy Rohr Prize in Jewish
Literature, and the 2008 National Book Award in Fiction.